But some, including the Rockefeller Foundation, were worried about a basic cause of revolutionary upheaval: the conflict or contradiction between a rapidly growing, poverty-stricken population and the inability of colonial and neocolonial capitalism to provide enough food. They saw that the outgrowth of this contradiction, hunger, was a major Communist ally in Asia and that one way to fight it would be with food.
This association between food production and anti-Communism was quite conscious. Though it may seem a bit unsophisticated today, when anti-Communism is called humanitarian intervention in the academic community, during the 1950s the relation was discussed quite openly. “The major problem in the struggle to keep South and Southeast Asia free of Communist domination,” wrote Fulbright scholar John King in Foreign Affairs in 1953, “is the standard of living of their peoples . . . . The struggle of the ‘East’ versus the ‘West’ in Asia is, in part, a race for production, and rice is the symbol and substance of it.”12
Nor was this view new. Food was already an old weapon in the anti-Communist arsenal of American capitalism. After the First World War Herbert Hoover had wielded food relief against “Bolshevist insurrection” in Eastern Europe --sometimes offering, sometimes withholding food aid to support anti-Communist forces.13 Toward the close of the Second World War the United States funneled food and other economic aid to Chang Kai-shek in China through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. At the end of the war, major food aid was sent to France and Italy to help stave off famine and growing Communist-led unrest. After the initial emergency shipments, food was kept flowing to a shaky Europe through the Marshall Plan. These aid-financed exports subsidized U.S. farm prices, and production soared.
In the early 1950s when aid fell off, commercial demand failed to grow apace. The result was rapidly accumulating surpluses and sagging food prices. A struggle over farm legislation ensued between those farmers who wanted support prices and those free traders of the elite, inside and outside the State Department, who feared the impact on world markets, and hence on Third-World stability, of high U.S. prices and subsidized dumping. The immediate outcome for several years was that the farmers got their support prices and the surplus problem grew. But in 1954 the elite got Public Law 480 which put a new food weapon into their not unwilling hands.14 Hubert H. Humphrey, one of those most responsible for P.L. 480, saw its potential this way: “I have heard . . . that people may become dependent on us for food. I know that was not supposed to be good news. To me that was good news, because before people can do anything they have got to eat. And if you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific . . ."
Very dangerous...
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